strength and fragrance; this is the color of the best people, these are the movers of movers, this is the salt of the salt of the earth"*.
Thus, by the end of his literary activity Chernyshevsky, despite his negative attitude
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* It is supposed that in the person of Rakhmetov Chernyshevsky depicted a certain Bakhmetiev, who in Herzen's work ("The Common Fund". A Collection of Posthumous Essays, Geneva, 1874, pp. 181 et seq.) is portrayed in a completely different manner. Herzen met him in London in 1858: approximately at this time Rakhmetov in Chernyshevsky's work leaves for abroad. In our author's account, Rakhmetov appears abroad to Feuerbach in order to offer him money for the publication of his works (incidentally, this once again demonstrates how highly Chernyshevsky valued Feuerbach, "the greatest of European thinkers of the nineteenth century, the father of the new philosophy." "What Is to Be Done?", loc. cit., 194); Bakhmetiev, meanwhile, came to London to Herzen in order to offer him a portion of his capital for the cause of Russian propaganda. Here is how Herzen describes Bakhmetiev:
"A young man with the appearance of a cadet, shy, very cheerless and with a peculiar exterior, rather crudely finished, [typical] of seventh or eighth sons of steppe landowners. Very taciturn, he was silent almost the entire time; one could see that something was on his mind, but he could not bring himself to express anything.
I left, inviting him to dinner in a couple of days or so. Before that I met him on the street.
'May I walk with you?' he asked.
'Of course, it's not dangerous for me with you, but for you with me. But London is large.'
'I'm not afraid,' and suddenly then, champing at the bit, he spoke rapidly: 'I will never return to Russia, no, no, I definitely will not return to Russia...'
'Good heavens, you are so young.'
'I love Russia, I love it very much; but the people there... It is no life for me there. I want to establish a colony on completely social foundations; I have thought it all through and now I am going straight there.'
'That is, where?'
'To the Marquesas Islands.'
Out of his 50,000 francs, Bakhmetiev took 30,000 with him to the Marquesas Islands, tying them up in a handkerchief "the way one ties up a pound of gooseberries or nuts," and left 20,000 with Herzen for the cause of propaganda: this was the "Common Fund," which later gave rise to so much discord among Russian émigrés. The further fate of Bakhmetiev is completely unknown; he disappeared without a trace. In Herzen's depiction, he comes across as some sort of unhinged, almost half-witted eccentric, bearing very little resemblance to the formidable and severe figure of Rakhmetov. But then it must be said: Herzen was organically incapable of understanding Russian revolutionaries of that time; on this very soil arose all those misunderstandings which poisoned the last days of his life. If Herzen could so falsely understand the writers Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, what is surprising if he completely failed to understand the angular and severe representative of revolutionary youth? But on the other hand, it is quite possible [that] one of two other suppositions [is true]:
either Bakhmetiev did not serve as a prototype for Rakhmetov at all, or Chernyshevsky greatly idealized him, creating an image having nothing in common with the original, or combining in him traits from the character of Dobrolyubov (the stern sense of civic duty), Bakunin (travels through Slavic lands, cf. also Kelsiев), Serakovskii (rapprochement with all classes), and so forth.
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toward Russian society and mistrust in the activity of the popular masses, began to admit the possibility of a broad revolutionary movement, provoked by the disappointment of the peasantry in the reform of 1861. On the other hand, he could ascertain the existence of new people, revolutionaries from the intelligentsia, ready to stand at the head of the people in their struggle against the kingdom of exploitation and oppression...
By what path, then, should revolutionary movement in Russia have proceeded from the point of view of Chernyshevsky?
Above (in Chapter VI) we saw that according to his general political views Chernyshevsky stood close to Blanquism - to Blanquism not in the sense which this word subsequently acquired and is still used in colloquial speech today*, but rather in the sense in which Marx understood it, when he recognized Blanquists as true representatives of the revolutionary proletariat... The Blanquists held to the point of view that a minority is strong only insofar as it correctly expresses, if not the strivings, then at least the interests of the laboring majority.
On this same point of view, the only one possible for epochs characterized by the passivity of the popular masses, Chernyshevsky apparently also stood. He distinctly emphasized that without the participation of the popular masses one cannot achieve serious practical results; he said that only the sympathy of the broad masses is capable of ensuring the success of one or another political program and that without arousing enthusiasm in the masses revolutionary
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* An example of such superficial understanding of Blanquism is provided by Mr. Nikolaev's reasoning about Chernyshevsky's political views. After recounting his conversation with Chernyshevsky in hard labor, during which Nikolai Gavrilovich expressed the thought that it would have been much better if during the peasant reform the openly serf-owning party of the nobility had triumphed and the peasants had been freed without land, for then a catastrophe would have occurred immediately, Mr. Nikolaev concludes: "Here, as you see, is pure Blanquism: the worse the better (!). This hardly resembles the later theories of our homegrown Marxists (who, incidentally, were precisely attributed this principle of 'the worse the better' by gentlemen of the Nikolaev sort in their time and were precisely accused by these gentlemen of sympathy with the dispossession of the peasantry. - Yu. S.). Not evolution, not the gradual liberation of peasants from the means of production, not the boiling of the muzhik in the factory cauldron, not his gradual transformation into a wage laborer, but complete and immediate dispossession. Not evolution, to which, I repeat, N. G. was indignant (?), but catastrophe. Not Marxism, but Blanquism" ("Personal Reminiscences," 21-22). - It must be said, one can obtain a fine understanding of Chernyshevsky's views from such a tirade!
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